‘Worth crossing continents for’: Bangkok Diners Club, The Edinburgh Castle, reviewed

The first “portal” in time and space opened between New York and Dublin in May last year. It had to be closed after less than a week — people on the Irish side kept flashing it, to the horror of their American counterparts. The human race overcame the laws of physics only to be defeated by the law of sods.

The portal above The Edinburgh Castle Pub to the streets of Bangkok has been open for two months. So it would seem no one has flashed the kitchen yet. Thus, the lucky and well-behaved Mancunians can continue to eat dishes seemingly fresh off the streets of Bangkok despite being seated on worn-in leather chairs in the upstairs dining room of an old man’s pub.

The Edinburgh Castle - the pub, that is - has a record of serving great food. It was the doorstop chip butties, above anything else, which garnered this old multi-storey building a reputation that reached into the farthest corners of the land. It was a short menu, but a good one, suitable for either a proper dinner or to accompany a well-poured pint. It’s places like this that might’ve made AA Gill waver in his steadfast hatred of gastropubs – had he lived to see it. He viciously dismissed pubs that served food, and for a time, he was right.

But things have changed now. These days you can get glorious food in many pubs, though it is still very rare to find such racy, invigorating Thai flavours on tap.

Inspiration is certainly not in short supply at Bangkok Diners Club, though on a recent Thursday night, diners were few and far between. The staff seem unfazed by the quiet but call it a night – quite literally to the tune of Kavinsky – mop in hand as we sip the dregs of our wine. I’m surprised to see it this sleepy; club membership (dishes range from £4 - £16.50) is vanishingly good value and though Manchester has some cracking Thai restaurants - Try Thai and hopefully the upcoming Zaap on Lincoln Square - is there really anywhere else serving a papaya salad so spicy your ears start ringing?

One of my only points of contention is the naming of the papaya salad, which is known further east as som tum. Whitewash the walls if you must, not the menu. But Ben and Bo Humphries, the couple at the helm of this steadfast ship, managed to steer me back round with a similarly spice-laden peach picante and a chewy, glistening molehill of umami-packed, herb-loaded salt-aged beef nam tok with bone marrow aioli (£15).

You could say they’re really cooking on gas here, but that would be fake news, and there’s enough of that out there already. If the chicken thigh skewers with milk caramel (£10) tell a tale, it is one of fire, smoke and coal, and it’s an alluring one at that. Better still is the fish. A punchy smoked mackerel, grapefruit and ginger salad (£9) goes straight into my summer barbecue arsenal, though I don’t think I could realistically hope to recreate the charred bream, swimming as it was in a pool of sweet coconut milk inflected with a citrus-packed herb oil (£16.50).

Us Northerners do many things well, not least a good curry, and of course curry’s best friend and Thailand’s biggest food export - rice. As such my standards for the two are very high, and sadly this is the only place Bangkok Diners Club fell short. The chicken fat rice (£5) was heartbreakingly devoid of the fowl juices I had imagined, a fact only exacerbated by how good the previous kitchen tenants were at using porous carbs to absorb delicious fats.

The Herdwick mutton gaeng khua with pickled celeriac (£16) was lacking in lime leaf and the tangle of root garnish was missing a truly pickled punch. Nevertheless, they only paled in comparison to their accomplished table-mates, which did exactly what Thai food does so well: offer a munificence of flavour with laser-like focus that feels like seeing in colour for the first time.

There’s only one option for dessert and it’s not a good one. It’s a Magnum that has been undressed, degloved, reduced to its most boring inners. Magnums did not become the King of the Street Ice Creams by waltzing around without that signature sharp crack of thick chocolate.

And so we find ourselves at the Bangkok Dessert Club, staring down at a naked Magnum, which tastes very lightly of rice and is topped with mango and raspberry puree (£7.50) in an attempt to make it look less bare. One between four was ample; a flat end to an otherwise standout dinner.

The sun has long since set in Bangkok by the time we land back on the pavement, but in Manchester it is still light. Must be the time difference. Turns out you don’t need wormholes to collapse time and space — just fire, fish, and a mackerel salad worth crossing continents for.

By Meg Houghton-Gilmour

Edinburgh Castle and Bangkok Diners Club are on Confidential Guides